Does this gel with anyone else's experiences?
"I can tell when in my childhood a particular trauma response is from by how conscious I feel aware of it. The more unconscious the compulsion, the earlier the relevant experience."
Conversation
I guess I'm specifically asking folks with multiple distinct traumatic experiences from different ages... 🤔
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I noticed when chatting to my therapist yesterday that the ones that feel like they're of the form "It never even occurs to me to..." are from when I was 5, and the ones that feel more like "when I think about X, I always..." are from when I was 10
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Particular thing I'm working on:
When I think about asking for help, I'm good at asking. But most of the time when I need help, it doesn't even occur to me that I might ask for it, like something unconscious misdirects the idea before it becomes a thought. I just feel fear.
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More verbal techniques like IFS work better on the more conscious compulsions from when I'm older, but when I'm healing from the things when I was <5, I find most of the processing is non-verbal and illegible. I need to near-silently vibe with the relevant parts
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Well, not strictly non-verbal - a few simple repetitive sentences of expressing some truth (this time: "you'll help me") works, but nothing more complicated than that.
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The way it worked out this time was I said those words, started crying, and then kinda leaned into the tears meaningfully but wordlessly until they felt transformed, repeating the words once in a while
This is my usual experience of healing from things I learned at preschool age
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(In other news, therapy is going well)
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Replying to
🙏
also thank you this is relevant to my life, feels like i’m having to go back further to earlier less verbal stuff and having some trouble